Left ventricular myocardium segmentation on arterial phase of multi-detector row computed tomography

The horizontal long axis and short axis images from apex to base of LV.

The proposed segmentation for the middle-ventricle slice on an MDCT imaging: (a) original image, (b) preprocessed image, (c) result of the region growing process, (d) the extracted endocardial contour, (e) the extracted epicardial contour and (f) the formed ROI.

Flowchart of the proposed scheme for auto-segmentation of LV on MDCT imaging.

Results of the anisotropic diffusion de-nosing: (a) de-nosed result of Fig. 2(a), (b) difference image (enhanced by logarithm transformation) between Figs. 2(a) and 4(a).

Histograms of (a) original image and (b) the intensity transformed image.

Automatic seed searching: (a) binary image that generated by thresholding on the enhanced image, (b) the speckle removed image (using the erosion operator) and (c) located seed from the biggest region near the centroid of image.

A comparison of the endocardial and epicardial contours: (a) the endocardial contour generated by region growing and (b) the improved contours using the convex hull algorithm.

Inappropriate segmentations by using (a) region growing method and (b) level-set segmentation.

Propagation term controls contour motion, a positive value of P forces the contour to expand.

Comparison of an automated contouring area (SEG) with the manual contouring area (REF), with (overlap) the correctly segmented pixels (extra) the false positives and (miss) the false negatives.

Automatic contouring results (Case#1) by using the proposed method.

Manual sketched contours (Case#1) by Expert#1.

(a) Scatter plot of the automatic segmentation (SEG) against the mean of manual segmentation from two experts (REF) for all datasets and (b) cumulative distribution of error distance between manual contours and the automatically segmented contours.

(a) An unsatisfied contour generated by the proposed method and (b) the contour delineated by experts.

Contours generated by the LSM (solid line) and the region growing method (dotted line).